This Day in Labor History: December 28, 1869. The Knights of Labor were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The organization grew slowly, but by the late 1870s, the Knights had become the nation’s largest labor union, remaining so through 1886. Let's talk about the Knights!
Labor was at a crossroads in post-Civil War America. The Civil War helped spur the growth of large factories and capitalists like John D. Rockefeller began expanding their economic reach into what became the monopoly capitalism of the Gilded Age.
Workers found the ground caving under their feet. Working-class people began criticizing the new economic system, but it took several decades for modern radicalism to become a common response for the working classes.
All sorts of ideas were floated out there. Henry George had his single tax. Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backwards and Americans were deeply taken with the work.
As Leon Fink notes in his classic treatise on the Knights of Labor, Workingmen’s Democracy, labor was not in 1869 nor in 1885 at a point where revolutionary consciousness was really on the table for most workers. They were essentially pre-Marxist critics of the growing wage labor system.
They believed in an idea of balance between employer and employee, but recognized that this balance had been thrown out of whack by the massive aggregation of capital into the hands of the few.
